The sound of a throat clearing brought his attention back to the Sergeant who had not moved an inch from the painted boulders during their break. His soldiers responded to the noise with military precision and collected the parchment into various bags using a system Horace failed to understand. Quickly glancing towards Rita to make sure she had finished in time, he sighed with relief that she appeared to be done when the soldier came to collect their letters. The three kids whose dungeon was nearby started sobbing together. The oldest, a boy around fourteen, pretended to move with the soldiers when they began to separate them from the larger group but then lashed out with a wild swing towards the nearest soldier's head as they moved away. He must have successfully fooled them since his arm connected, and the soldier was knocked back. His group kept the other soldiers busy while the older boy delivered two quick jabs to the soldier's ribs and darted past them.

The larger group blocked his return to the wall, so he instead turned and raced past the white boulders—his youthful energy allowing him to avoid being grabbed. Horace did not see what happened, but as the boy passed the boulders, he only made it a few feet before his wild run turned into a crawl. He was grasping his head and gasping out until he collapsed onto his knees. The Sergeant laughed cruelly and motioned the soldiers to collect him and continue on. Horace was shocked at how suddenly the encounter had ended. He did not think he would be brave or dumb enough to try and escape, yet he respected the boy for not giving in to his fate meekly like the rest of them were.

The group continued forwards, and as his feet crossed behind the white boulders, the Sergeant had stopped behind. He felt a strange sensation. Rita openly gasped when she went through moments later, but Aiden didn’t seem fazed at all. To him, it felt like a pressure existed right on the edge of his awareness, and it made him feel self-conscious as if someone was staring right into him. It got more uncomfortable as they traveled but never impaired his ability. For Rita, he could tell it was different. After only fifteen minutes inside, she was visibly reacting, and one of the older soldiers gestured to a nearby female associate to walk beside Rita and support her. He wasn't sure what was going on since most of the group seemed unaffected. The guards’ quiet movements and alert posture told him not to ask questions right then, if ever. With little else to entertain himself, he pondered why Rita was the most affected in their group and why he felt anything. The only connections he could think of were their mutual meditation skill or possibly their higher than average wisdom. Those were the only things they had that Aiden did not, and the blond boy looked confused, not uncomfortable. Maybe being an airhead is beneficial once in a while, thought Horace wryly.

To test his hypothesis, he decided to meditate as he walked, resulting in some unsurprising accidents. Aiden eventually caught on that he was trying something and helped him walk straight to relax enough to enter a proper meditative state. He was not sure how long it took, but eventually, he calmed enough to drift into one and nearly had a heart attack when he felt something else there with him. The second time took even longer to relax because he was stressing over what the presence might be doing or could be doing with his mind. As he drifted back in, he realized belatedly that the presence, while there, seemed distant from himself and fractured like it was one entity looking at all of them at once.

That knowledge gave him the confidence to evaluate it, and he was able to confirm it was related to the sensation he felt on his body. Digging deeper into all the sensations he could feel, he realized that it was not observing him as he first thought. You have to be at least somewhat sentient to observe something, and whatever presence he felt was too foreign to be actually 'watching' him. It was clinical and detached with no curiosity at all, and he realized it was an all-encompassing feeling instead of being directed at him in particular. Saying it was watching him would be the same as saying the nearest rock was, yet he still felt decidedly uncomfortable because he knew that the feeling was related to the dungeon they were passing above. Maybe Rita sensed things differently, which is why she was shaking so much since she hadn’t been meditating at all as far as he knew. Whatever, the reason the feeling began to fade after a bit and only resumed in a lessened severity a few times through their walk.

As night fell, only a third of the original groups remained. The rest had been sent off with two guards each towards their respective dungeons. Now there were only eight guards left watching them as they tried to settle down for the last night above ground. He was sure they would have continued longer if the Sergeant had thought they could, but a sandstorm started nearby. Visibility was too low to risk it this close to active dungeons. Aiden and Rita chose to settle their packs right beside him, and they snuggled together for comfort more than warmth. For one last night, they could sleep knowing that their life was securely in someone else's hands.

In the night, he was woken suddenly by the sharp sound of a sword being pulled from its scabbard. A quick shout followed the noise, "Hostiles incoming, left-wing engage, right-wing defend." The Sergeant's voice was nonchalant, and Horace sat up to try and see what they were facing. The darkness made it difficult, but he caught a glimpse of sleek furry bodies darting around the three soldiers who had walked out to attack. From evaluating his animals, he knew how to mentally flex his focus to bring out their foe's information.

[Sand Wolf]

Level: 7

Class: Hunter

Status: Mana Starved

He was less worried after evaluating it since the guards should be able to handle a couple of level sevens with ease. However, as he watched them fight, he noticed the caution they were showing at an enemy that should be well within their ability to handle. From what he had heard, soldiers should be an average level often to be a dungeon guard, but maybe that was no longer accurate for some reason. He observed as the wolf he had examined made a sudden leap and caught the elbow of the male soldier facing it and nearly pulled the man down. The quick movement of one of the defending soldiers kept that from was happening as they fired an arrow into the wolf's eye. Horace was sure now that there was more going on here because that soldier was very skilled and likely could have taken out all the beasts on her own. When the wolves had been defeated, the Sergeant went up and slapped each man on the back to acknowledge their fight before telling everyone to go back to sleep. He shot Aiden a look and saw that his companion had also seen how strange everything was. Maybe tomorrow, they could get some answers before they were sequestered into a dungeon like those poor kids sent in today.